For the last two years, Chattanooga, Tenn.’s public utility (EPB) has offered customers a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection costing roughly $300 a month, so I touched base with a group of investors and entrepreneurs who have built a program to try to see what people can do with that fast a connection. So far, the limits of equipment, the lack of other gigabit networks (much of the Internet is reciprocal so it’s no fun if you have the speeds to send a holographic image of yourself but no one on the other end can receive it) and the small number of experiments on the network have left the founders of the Lamp Post Group underwhelmed.

This was the first year that Jack Studer, a partner with the Lamp Post Group, a tech incubator in Chattanooga, and Brian Trautschold, a cofounder at Akimbo, opened their doors to two groups of people from outside the city excited by the prospect of a gigabit connection. The two welcomed a group of 21 entrepreneurs on May 14 and a group of 11 students on June 11 into the incubator. The aim was to get both groups thinking about gigabit applications and opportunities. While Studer was reluctant to out the business plans developed by the entrepreneurs ahead of the upcoming demo day (August 9, for those who want to check it out), he shared some of the things the students were developing. They include:

Instant universal translation

Facial recognition in real time at a point of sale or security point

A better, easier to use electricity systems for the home that incorporates the smart grid as well as device management for consumers

Workstation apps as a service, such as delivering Photoshop or other CPU-intensive applications via the cloud

Many of these are interesting, but as most people are probably thinking, none of them look like the killer app for a gigabit network. And Studer is well aware of this. He said that so far he’s happy with the program, but he does wish it could see more people participate and produce bigger ideas that really take advantage of the network. In our conversation he explained what needs work.

More brains, more people: This is the first year of the program, and Studer explains that the 30 people who are in the program so far aren’t really enough to generate the kind of creative firepower to remake the world with a gigabit in mind. “We have 30 people, but we need 200 to 300,” Studer said. He also said it was challenging to get mentors to come from outside Chattanooga, especially people from tech hubs, to discuss ideas and influence the people. He said the program has had some good people, but not the quantity he had hoped for.

Better equipment: Another problem with delivering a gigabit is that most computers can’t handle the speeds. “We have bought a lot of SSDs this summer,” quipped Studer, because hard drives aren’t fast enough to store the bits coming in via a gigabit pipe. Think of it like trying to fill a paper cup from a fire hose.

More gigabit users out in the rest of the world: The other challenge, which Studer and I had discussed prior to beginning the program, was a lack of gigabit connections elsewhere in the country. Prior to bringing in entrepreneurs and students he was looking for someone to test out Chattanooga’s network connections and equipment, but it was hard to find people, and some weren’t clear what he was trying to test exactly. And as Google builds its network and other efforts such as the Gig.U university broadband plans come online, this problem may gradually disappear.

New tech to cram more bits in your hertz.

Clearly Google may not have the challenges of finding smart people to play with its network — it’s a company that has plenty of genius employees as well as the clout to bring in engineers and geeks from any other tech firm it wants. It builds its own gear so the technical challenges experienced by Chattanooga may not be as much of an issue for the search giant, but the experience in Chattanooga indicates that the mentality of “If you build it, the gigabit applications will come,” may require both more effort and time than people realize.

Of course, apps and broadband speeds evolve in fits and spurts, so it’s hard to say what will trigger the next killer app or when. All we can say for sure is we won’t get gigabit apps until we have gigabit networks. Until then, we can have fun, filling up those pipes by running concurrent gaming and video streams.

]]>The guys at the Lamp Post Group in Chattanooga, Tenn., have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to bandwidth. The city boasts the first real gigabit speeds in the U.S., and today is the deadline for folks to apply to come to the city this summer to build applications that can take advantage of the network’s awesome speeds. But there’s a problem too.

The Internet is reciprocal, and without other folks with gigabit connections, Jack Studer, a managing partner at Lamp Post, is wondering who the students, developers and hackers that plan to come play on the network will talk to. Sure, the network works inside the town. Studer has described some of the ways it has changed the way he runs his business. But what happens if he tries to build apps and ship them over long-haul networks?

The problem is both a lack of powerful gigabit networks, but also uncertainty about what happens when a large number of people start sending traffic out from Chattanooga’s networks. As a commenter explained in a recent post, a gigabit is only as good as the backhaul coming into it. Which means if I use a gigabit connection and start uploading something to the web at large, only the first mile will be fast. And if an entire town (or a bunch of enterprising developers) finds ways to use the bandwidth on its first mile of access, at some point something might break.

So Studer is looking for the universities, the towns with their own fiber networks, and maybe ISP’s such as Sonic.net or Verizon’s labs to talk to his network. Help him kick the tires a bit and see what happens. So if you have a gig or maybe even 500 Mbps, plus an extra server lying around, give Lamp Post a call. You might be helping build the next generation of connectivity. And how cool would that be?

]]>Consumer applications have driven the rapid take up of faster broadband services in the U.S. in the last decade as people downloaded iTunes songs and apps and watched streaming movies via Netflix. But as Google and others build gigabit networks to see what can be done with them, maybe it’s time to bring businesses back into the innovation cycle.

In Chattanooga, Tenn. the creation of a gigabit network has led to the formation of an incubator that wants to attract startups to the city this summer to play around with the nation’s first gigabit network. I spoke with Jack Studer, the managing partner at Lamp Post Group, which is the incubator hosting the contest, on what kinds of applications might drive people to get a gig.

Studer explained that while consumer applications were fun, the lack of other gigabit networks around the country made it a bit difficult to justify building a startup or business that needs a gigabit connection. Even if Studer has the bandwidth to receive a massively fat 3-D holographic image of me for a video conference, I couldn’t reciprocate on my 60 Mbps cable connection (that really delivers 30 Mbps) so building a consumer 3-D holographic web conferencing business is probably a long shot. Other similarly bandwidth-intensive ideas are also out … for now.

“Startups that require a gig — well, that business plan would suck. It’s like building up a business based on teleportation. It doesn’t exist yet,” said Studer.

Where the gigabit network really shines is business productivity says Studer. He points out that he can do things between his offices in Chattanooga that are truly business-changing such as real-time and continual data backups and replication. And that’s just the beginning. Studer has ideas around connecting distributed compute nodes around the city that could essentially turn Chattanooga into a giant supercomputer.

Gigabit speed, and the fact that no applications today require such speeds, mean a variety of services that now run on the computer might run in the network instead without it affecting the end-user. That has implications for data processing and the creation of new services based on an intelligent network. Such services might even become necessary as we connect more devices to the network.

For example, if we have a smart home where our computers, CE devices and even our lighting or appliances are connected to the network, we have to think about securing all of those endpoints. The current model of having antivirus software sitting on a PC no longer makes sense, but what about putting it on the network? A fast network means one could run services such as antivirus on the network without the user noticing.

But to bring the future to life, Studer needs students, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to come to Chattanooga to play around with the network. Who’s up for the challenge?